ECP NetHappenings Mark Cuban will run for President

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Mark Cuban will run for President

Mark Cuban @mcuban costplusdrugs
https://costplusdrugs.com

Mark Cuban on AI:
“The two types of approaches to AI, some people who use it so they don’t have to learn anything, and some people who use it so they have the opportunity to learn everything.”

Democrats Believe Kamala Harris Is Less ‘Electable’ Than Mark Cuban

ESSAY Armaan Sidhu @realarmaansidhu
https://x.com/realarmaansidhu/status/2044669506216194440

Mark Cuban just proposed replacing health insurance with a bank account.
$2,100/month deposit.
$300 for catastrophic stop-loss insurance.
$200 for direct primary care.
The remaining $1,600 stays in YOUR account.

If you never use it, you keep it at 65. If you have a big expense, the bank loans you up to $30k to cover it, and you repay from the monthly deposits.

The simplest part of the proposal is the most radical: insurance premiums are the only debt Americans pay for life. You will pay health insurance premiums every month until you die, and you will never own anything at the end of it. Every other debt has a payoff date. Health insurance has an expiration date only when you do.

Let’s run the math on Cuban’s proposal for a family of 5.

Current reality:
$2,100/month in ACA Silver premiums = $25,200/year.
Over 40 years of working adulthood (25-65): $1,008,000.
Plus copays, deductibles, out-of-network charges, surprise bills.
Estimated lifetime healthcare spending for a typical American family: $1.5-2 million.
Most of that going to insurance companies who take a cut at every step.

Cuban’s proposal:
$300/month for stop-loss insurance (catastrophic only).
$200/month for direct primary care (a doctor who sees you for a flat fee, no insurance billing).
$1,600/month into your own HSA-style account.
Over 40 years at even modest interest, that $1,600/month compounds to approximately $1.5-2 million — roughly the same amount families currently spend on insurance, but sitting in the family’s bank account instead of an insurance company’s reserve.

The structural shift: instead of pooling risk with strangers through an insurance company’s underwriting, you pool risk with your own future self. Every dollar you don’t spend on medical care today is a dollar you have for medical care later, or for retirement, or for your kids’ inheritance.

The insurance industry’s entire business model depends on the gap between premiums collected and claims paid.
That gap funded $550+ billion in combined market cap across UnitedHealth, Anthem, Cigna, Humana, and CVS/Aetna. The money is real. It’s just not flowing to healthcare.
It’s flowing to shareholders.

Cuban’s proposal doesn’t eliminate healthcare costs.
Medical care still costs whatever it costs. What it eliminates is the insurance middleman extracting value at every transaction. Direct primary care doctors already operate on this model and charge $50-150/month for unlimited primary care visits. Stop-loss insurance already exists for catastrophic expenses. Both are currently available. What Cuban proposed is combining them into a structure most Americans can access.

The objections are predictable and real:

Objection 1: What about chronic conditions requiring ongoing expensive treatment?
Answer: stop-loss insurance covers anything above $30k. If a chronic condition triggers the stop-loss repeatedly, the system handles it the same way insurance does — catastrophic coverage kicks in.

Objection 2: What about people who can’t afford $2,100/month?
Answer: they can’t afford ACA Silver premiums either. The proposal doesn’t solve affordability for the uninsured. It restructures the system for the 160M+ Americans currently paying for employer or ACA insurance who would be financially better off under this model.

Objection 3: What prevents people from skimping on preventive care to save money?
Answer: direct primary care is included. Unlimited primary visits at a flat fee. The structure incentivizes using primary care — it’s already paid for.

Objection 4: Regulatory barriers. ERISA, ACA employer mandates, state insurance commissioners, HSA rules.
All real. All why this is a “lots of work and issues to be addressed” proposal rather than a turnkey solution.

But strip away the implementation challenges and look at the core insight:
Americans are paying lifetime insurance premiums on the assumption that they need insurance companies to manage healthcare risk. They don’t. They need catastrophic coverage for the worst-case scenarios and direct access to doctors for everything else. Everything between those two is insurance industry rent extraction.

Cuban is a billionaire who started a low-cost pharmacy because he noticed that drug pricing was broken. Now he’s noticing that insurance pricing is broken the same way. The man doesn’t need this to work for him — he’s wealthy enough to pay cash for any medical expense. He’s proposing it because the current system extracts $550 billion in market cap from sick Americans and their employers while producing worse health outcomes than every peer country.

657,000 views on an X post from a billionaire proposing to eliminate the need for private health insurance. That’s the engagement of an idea whose time might be arriving. Not because Cuban is a policy expert. Because the math is so obvious that even people who don’t follow healthcare policy can see it.

The one debt Americans can never pay off is the one they’ve never been invited to think of as a debt. Cuban just invited them. 657,000 Americans are starting to do the math.

The insurance industry’s business model depends on them never finishing.

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Mark Cuban will run for President

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